Google has used its weight to build a technically better product, won the market, and are now driving the whole web platform forward the way they like it.
This has nothing to do with the cost of maintaining the browser for them.
I'm not sure what else it would be about - I don't see why they would especially care about removing XSLT support if cost isn't a factor.
There is this weird idea that wealthy people & corporations arent like the rest of us, and no rules apply to them. And to a certain extent its true that things are different if you have that type of wealth. But at the end of the day, everyone is still human, and the same restrictions still generally apply. At most they are just pushed a little further out.
I am sure they've got good reasons they want to do this: them having the same problems as an unstaffed open source project getting vocal user requests is not one of them.
You're completely right in your literal point quoted above, but note what I was emphasizing. In this example, "save the animals" was offered as an example of a problem oversaturated in awareness to a point of diminishing returns. If you don't think animal welfare illustrates that particular idea, insert whatever your preferred example is. Free tibet, stop diamond trade, don't eat too much sodium, Nico Harrison shouldn't be a GM in NBA basketball, etc.
I think everyone on all sides agrees with these messages and agrees that there's value in broadcasting them up to a point, but then it becomes not an issue of awareness but willpower of relevant actors.
You also may well be right that developers would react negatively, honestly I'm not sure. But the point here was supposed to be that this pages author wasn't making the mistake of strategic misunderstanding on the point of oversaturating an audience with a message. Though perhaps they made the mistake in thinking they would reach a sympathetic audience.
I guess I'm not seeing how that follows. It can still be complimentary to the overall goal rather than a failure to understand the necessity of persuasion. I think the needed alchemy is a serving of both, and I think it actually is trying to persuade at least to some degree.
I take your point with endangered animal awareness as a case of a cause where more awareness leads to diminishing returns. But if anything that serves to emphasize how XSLT is, by contrast, not anywhere near "save the animals" level of oversaturation. Because save the animals (in some variation) is on the bumper sticker of at least one car in any grocery store parking lot, and I don't think XSLT is close to that.